The enormous success of Chris Cleave's “Little Bee,” a searing story of two women united in tragedy before a backdrop of geopolitical danger, gave him license to do just about whatever he wanted with his next novel, so he chose ... a cycling story of two women in competition for the 2012 British Olympic team.

Give him credit for unpredictability — and timing; shortly before his book was published in the United States, two American female sprinters — like the main characters in “Gold,” friends coached by the same man — were in a dead heat for the final spot in the 100 meters, necessitating a tiebreaker.

In “Little Bee,” Cleave demonstrated nimble plotting, inventive use of language with a comic touch, and an ability to milk the drama from a scene, even if he sometimes went over the top in building suspense and risked alienating the reader by being too baldly manipulative. The challenge for him in this novel, which is smaller in almost every way than his previous work, was to have the characters' psyches and personal dramas carry the action, without the armature of world events (or only world “sporting” events) for support and significance.

As in “Little Bee,” two strong female characters — this time, literally strong athletes — anchor the story. Since their teens, Zoe Castle and Kate Meadows have been the top performers on the elite British cycling circuit (and eventually in the world), and this is not the weeks-long scenic road races that even casual sports fans are familiar with, but the banked wooden tracks of enclosed velodromes, where the races are short and explosive head-to-head battles.

As Zoe has proved with gold medals in Athens and Beijing (why and how Kate has missed her chances are part of the gradually revealed backstory), you can parlay that quadrennial triumph into a lucrative life, if also one that invites tabloid scrutiny. With the London Games approaching, both women are facing their last shot at Olympic glory.

The velodrome is a cauldron for playing out personal and professional competition.

Into this stew, Cleave has stirred an aging Australian coach, Tom, who instructs the women in both cycling and life and provides some needed comic relief; his emotional complexity grounds the book most successfully in reality. More problematically, Cleave has given Kate an 8-year-old daughter with leukemia; like the 4-year-old Charlie in “Little Bee,” who dealt with his problems by obsessively playing the role of Batman, Sophie in “Gold” immerses herself in the world of “Star Wars.”